Paying for drinks on Southwest Airlines became much easier in recent months, thanks to an upgrade of the company’s inflight retail technology. The carrier partnered with MOST to deliver more than 20,000 iPad mini 6 devices to crew, loaded with a new sales and payments platform. The solution brings together onboard product management, bespoke payment hardware, and efficient payment processing, all customized for the airline.
Deploying a solution at the scale of Southwest Airlines and at a rapid pace was a huge accomplishment for our team. Adopting the MOST solution makes for smoother exchanges between the airline’s Flight Attendants and Customers.
– Jan Blanchard, MOST CEO
“As we reimagine our inflight retail process, we needed a solution that eased workloads and improved our data collection, while reducing the time to handle each passenger transaction,” said Ron Freer, Senior Manager Inflight Mobility at Southwest Airlines. “MOST’s agile development process and rapid iterations allowed us to continuously revise the application, ensuring a successful deployment on a very aggressive timeline.”
MOST’s modular application architecture allows partners to develop a bespoke retail experience with minimal effort. Southwest’s implementation of this solution is believed to be the largest deployment of an iPad-based payment system in the airline industry, with more than 20,000 flight attendants carrying the devices across more than 4,000 daily flights.
A key success metric in the project was improving the interaction between cabin crew and passengers. Based on input from front-line crew at Southwest, MOST was able to revise the shopping cart UX on the tablets to reduce taps required for common purchase patterns. This included adding a quick check-out button for single-item purchases and making it easier to scan drink coupons in flight. The most.Onthego hardware also includes a dedicated payment device, linked to the iPad, in an ergonomic package. A single charging plug for the combined payment sleeve and iPad further eases the hardware management for crew.
Payments are handled via NFC/Contactless tap (including Apple and Google Pay), Smart Chip, or swipe. The most.Pay gateway processes transactions during flight, with the ability to work online via the carrier’s in-flight Wi-Fi service or in an offline mode, syncing after the fact.
And for the operations team, data analytics, including product management, can be relayed in near real-time to back-office systems via the most.Retail connected management architecture. The Retail module allows for data analysis on a flight-by-flight basis, bringing new levels of insight to Southwest’s team. The two companies expect to collaborate on future improvements to the catering and sales process, driven by this automated order tracking solution.
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